Tag Archives: Pen and Sword

On 21 May we had a launch party for Surviving the Death Railway; A POW’s Memoir and Letters from Home in the beautiful home where I spent the second half of my childhood. Here it is in the early morning of our wedding day in 1977. The party went splendidly and I was moved by the wonderful mixture of people – from relatives of the families in the book, to local people who remembered Barry and Phyllis (the book is about Barry, a Far East POW and Phyllis his wife, who waited out the war with no direct communication for three and a half years) and many of Barry and Phyllis’s (and my) relatives. There were men swapping stories about their father and their uncle and holding back their tears.

We returned across the country to our home. I began to relax, thinking I now had nearly a month to finish the private version of the book (done, and the proof copy arrived this morning to be checked), and to rescue the garden from the chaos of neglect (ongoing) and rediscover my study

under the piles books and papers (also done),before the second launch for local friends and other relatives on 18 June. This would then give me time to sort out marketing and publicity stuff before the release of the book on 30 June… I had even started looking in on your lovely, neglected blogs again. However, three days ago a cheerful email arrived telling me that the book had now been released (Pen and Sword publish by month and Amazon always release on the last day of that month – but I didn’t know that). This morning a lovely person from P & S’s digital marketing arm rang for more information and this evening I managed to update my website. Next Saturday I have 60 plus people coming for sandwiches, sangria and a book. I am juggling garden rescue, food planning and creating, proof-reading (again!!) and I feel as though I am being leapfrogged at every turn.

In between all this I have joined the local branch of Toastmasters to try and overcome my fear of public speaking (I did my ice-breaker last Tuesday to the friendliest bunch of people you could dream up). And I have been arranging talks in museums on Far East POWs.

This is all in the way of saying sorry that I am not visiting your blogs. I will return when the staff officers stop playing leapfrog.

Running out of time, my birthday present to my husband was the promise of a few days in Venice in September – sort of cheating as I get to go too… I can’t wait.

Free advice to writers – don’t try and work on two versions of the same book at the same time.

A couple of days ago I laid out the proofs of the private family version of Surviving the Death Railway on the dining room table in order to proof read it (again) and create the index. An hour later the final proofs for the published version arrived in my inbox. I cannot resist work, so I will check these again too. I have to occupy the dining room as there is no space left in my writing room and the state of it is making me feel ill.And yes, my chair is an old block of polystyrene. It is a hangover from my sculpture days. It’s good for posture and it keeps the nether regions warm… but it has seen better days. I’m thinking of converting to a Swedish exercise ball.

The day before the proofs arrived, the marketing team for Pen & Sword got in touch and I have a five-page form to fill in. This is great because I will not be doing the promotion and marketing solo, a job I dread (and am very bad at). However, it is also a headache as I don’t know the answer to many of the questions (local radio? clubs and societies?), or they are tricky for a jack of all trades (short summary of career and education).

In between showers I rush into the garden, collect slugs, dig for half an hour and catch the spring. I barely get to emails at the moment and many of your lovely posts are unvisited, I will post this and go on a whistle-stop tour, but then I must get back to the indexing and the marketing forms. I am extremely lucky to have a publisher, but I am a little sad that there are so few hours in the day and that I am neglecting friends.

I have become multi-tasking superwoman – while writing this post I have printed off (one by one) another ten invitation cards to the second of the two launch parties for the book. Anyone near Cambridge let me know, I’ll send one, and you could come and enjoy sandwiches and sangria on the 18th of June (or near Taunton on 21st May for tea and cakes).

I have read the finals proofs… thank god I did, I found some errors I had missed and some gremlins that had crept in via the text editors.

Re tulips… the deep red flowers are Anemone de Caen masquerading as tulips!

On the 23rd December a downloadable pdf of the 1st proofs of Surviving the Death Railway: A POW’s Memoirs and Letters from Home dropped into my inbox and on the 24th a print-out arrived in the post. This has meant that during the post-Christmas lull I have been able to settle to the task of checking them. The rather altar-like appearance of my workstation is because I have decamped to the post-Christmas dining room table. The numerous Post-Its don’t represent errors, but queries to myself… there do seem to be rather a lot… hmm. The redacted text is exactly that – a photo of a letter with a couple of lines obliterated by the censor.

Previously, I had a nightmare time with a small Indy publisher (novel one) and two arduous self-publishing experiences (novels two & three). This is my first experience of (niche) mainstream publishing and I’m impressed. Pen & Sword asked for specific reductions, but no radical changes, to the text; they changed the title, but I was encouraged to offer suggestions (not used, but I had my say and a veto); they consulted me about content for biogs and blurbs; they allowed me to influence the cover – their covers are not my kind of artwork, but they listened and had three goes; they showed me samples of text formatting before they went too far and changed the appearance of elements that worried me.

Basically, I have been incorporated into the decision process at each turn and problems have been quickly and straightforwardly sorted. The text – a really tricky combination of letters, memoirs, editorial content and 90 odd in-text illustrations, looks infinitely better that I had dreamt it could. So far so good.

Today we went on a kindling collecting walk across fields to a nearby small village. The sun shone, the air was warm and scraps of dead wood abounded. I have always been curious about this ruin in a field in the middle of the small village. I doubt it was a privy as there is too much window and there are no houses (now) nearby. Any ideas?

Anyone know what this fungus is? (Andrew can you help?) The nearest on the internet is Black Hoof Fungus, but that doesn’t look right to me. Is it something simple and obvious that has just aged into black?Apologies for the photographer shadow!

In researching my book (Surviving the Death Railway: A POW’s Memoirs and Letters from Home) I have read many accounts of the FAR East in WWII – first, second and often third-hand ones. Truth is an elusive commodity. Diaries contain the most truth, but their vision is necessarily narrow. Survivor accounts have the same problem, plus the interaction of memory and the layers history has added. Helpful sons and daughters can introduce bias, historians are more objective – but they weren’t there. Here are five contrasting publications that I have read recently. Each contains a fragment of the picture, each has a different sort of truth.

First a little slip of a book, POW Sketchbook: a story of survival by Judy and Stuart Dewey (Pie Powder Press). Judy and Stewart tell the story of the artist William Wilder, using his diary entries, his memories and his excellent drawings. You get a true picture of the daily grind: ‘Late dinner at night in dark. Up at 7 am, breakfast in the dark, just rice and sugar… carrying planks and heavy wood over rough rocks. Frightfully hot. … . It is really hell. Little drink, sun the bug-bear… .’ Or brief entries as he lay in hospital, ‘8 deaths in the last 24 hours.’ The following day, ’12 fellows died yesterday.’ He drew to survive, but his work was often taken by his captors or destroyed. 70 drawings survived. To have saved these and his diary was an act of extreme courage.

Next a slim but dramatic account, Out of the Depths
of Hell: A Soldiers’s Story of Life and Death in Japanese Hands by John McEwan (Pen & Sword – my publishers). This is a soldier’s account, lively, tough and full of the harrowing and detailed memories of the years spent, in his case, mostly in the grimmest slavery in the copper mines of Taiwan. His feelings about his mates, his captors and his views on life and religion make this extremely, though painfully, readable. The truth here is a personal one told through the long lens of memory.

This next one, The Burma Railway: The Original War Drawings of Japanese POWJack Chalker (Mercer Books 2007) is one of the most beautifully designed books I have ever handled, I want to weep and admire at the same time.It contains over a 100 full colour illustrations. The calibre and scope of these is astonishing. Every part of the POW experience is there. They are beautiful and painful. He depicts individuals undergoing sadistic punishments and hundreds of men at work, he shows wards of sick men and, when he worked with the famous surgeon Weary Dunlop, precise depictions of ulcers that ate into the bone. Jack tell his story between the drawings.

All the above are personal accounts with one main viewpoint; they do not claim to be literature or even research. They all contains inaccuracies.

My fourth is another small volume The Death Railway: A Brief History of The Thailand-Burma Railway by Rod Beattie (Thailand Burma Railway Centre Co., Ltd). This is modern, practical, and factual. Rod is the great researcher of the railway, an Australian who has walked, recorded and uncovered every inch of the tracks. He and Terry Manttan run the Centre at Kanchanaburi in Thailand and know more about the railway and the individuals who built her than anyone else alive. In his book Rod assembles essential facts and corrects many railway myths.

My last book is odd in this context – and I haven’t yet finished it – The Gift of Rain, Tan Twan Eng. It is high quality literature and a work of fiction. Set in Penang fifty years after the war, the story within it runs from 1939 to 1945. It is as multicultural at its setting – British, Chinese, Malay, Japanese and Indian characters cross the stage. Only in this mesmerising, page-turning book have I found a sense of how the war affected individuals of all kinds in that part of the world, and why cultures with opposing philosophies that had lived harmoniously until then, both helped and brutalised each other. You get a glimpse of why civilisation cracked up and again later was able to rebuild.

My Far East POW book is now in the publisher’s hands and I am haunted by all the books I have not yet read, the archives and museums I have not visited and all the threads I have failed to follow up. What troubles me is how little of the truth can be found in any one account. Maybe fiction can weave a truer tale.

Surviving the Death Railway cover

Border Line: click image to order, or available from Heffers bookshop, Cambridge UK

Border Line eBook cover

Border Line

"Of course love is the ultimate luxury, but I am unwilling to continue in the certainty of its absence."
Grace is searching online for ways to die and she finds Daniel. Like a pied piper, he leads her and nine other people on a trek across Slovenia. For twenty-one days they share stories, play games, surprise themselves with laughter… and make their final decisions.
An intense love story told against the backcloth of the Slovenian landscape. It tackles contentious issues around suicide and assisted dying and yet remains uplifting.

Unseen Unsung: click image to buy

Unseen Unsung

Luca, a brilliant and self-absorbed young opera singer, is buried in the rubble of a collapsed building. A girl crawls through the debris to comfort him and then vanishes. Perhaps she died in the ruins or maybe she is just a figment of his imagination. When he discovers the strange truth, he is unwilling to accept it.
This is a story of love between two people who would never have met and never have found common ground without one of the catastrophes of modern life.
Unseen Unsung celebrates the power of music and the force of human survival in a complex world.

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